


Like a Reflection from Long (so soon) Ago

by Pagalini



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Aliens, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-09
Updated: 2012-06-09
Packaged: 2017-11-07 09:00:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/429249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pagalini/pseuds/Pagalini
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wound up by the events of PotD and tWoM, the Doctor flits from one thought to the next like a bird with a broken wing, frantically trying to fly even as the fox draws closer and the inevitable is clear. Then he meets Jack - a horrible Jack, a Jack who is not Jack in so many ways it makes his hearts bleed.<br/>For once (like always), it's something the Doctor can't fix.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like a Reflection from Long (so soon) Ago

A whisper, a precious rush of sound – of feeling – soothing his mind with a gentle caress. Golden warmth floods through his gut, his hearts thrumming in his chest as he spirals up, up, up upupup—

Gasping, wheezing, hands frisking his face on the urge of a needle-sharp worry he feels all the way to his toes. No change. The vessel of his mind remains the same, right down to the light rasp of stubble and the griddle-pattern lacing his right cheek.

Griddle pattern? Swift, surefooted, he scrambles to his feet and realises he is in the console room. As if to reassure him the time rotor stirs slightly and wheezes; a dear friend giving an exasperated exhalation. 

The action, small as it may be, wrings a smile out of him.

“All right, old girl.”

He sways, frowning for a moment before realising that it is the TARDIS herself who is moving; a gentle motion, like that of a boat at sea.

Drifting…

The time rotor shifts again, this time a sharp jolt of motion that makes the grating judder beneath his feet so hard he has to grip the console for support. It’s like she’s trying to tell him something, trying to tell, to tell—

The lights are on but nobody’s home.

“American,” he decides, unsure what prompted the phrase in the first place. “Is it American?”

A moment later and he’s on his backside, pouting up at the coral ceiling with a distinct sinking feeling. “…What did I do now?”

_fool-beloved-listen_

“Ah. That, I can do.”

The source of the TARDIS’ annoyance becomes apparent in the form of an incessant trilling so the other side of the consol. He bounds around it, stumbling a little as her shaking intensifies, and snatches up the source of all the trouble.

Martha’s phone.

“’Ello? Sorry, I’m a tad busy right now—”

“I’m done.”

The seeming randomness of the statement throws him better than any bucking bronco ever has. “’Scuze? …Jack?!”

Jack Harkness; intergalactic conman come hero. Big, bright, larger-than-life Jack. Wrong Jack. Jack-that-can’t-die. Wrong Jack. Wrong-wrong wrong wrongwrongwrong—

“Doc? You still there?”

Darn straight he is. “Yes, Jack?”

“I said I was done.”

“I heard you, Jack.” Sure did, and if that’s not an understatement then he doesn’t know Rassilon from Omega. “…What do you mean, ‘I’m done?’”

Even the do-up from the sonic screwdriver doesn’t do anything for the rush of static…oh, right. Jack’s sighing. Why would Jack sigh?

“I’m done, Doc. No more Torchwood.”

He sounds defeated. Jack doesn’t do defeated.

“Doctor?”

The Doctor sighs right back. “Yes, Jack?”

“I’m on a ship, outskirts of the Solar System. Could you…” pick me up? It goes unsaid, but the Doctor still hears it. “Please?”

He doesn’t give the Doctor co-ordinates before he hangs up, but that won’t slow him any if he chooses to comply. Jack-y boy; a great big glowing red target of Wrong. To miss a bulls-eye as blatant as that one would be a remarkable error.

Then again, the Doctor’s made his fair share of remarkable errors over the years…

The TARDIS grumbles, reminding him of the choice at hand before he has a chance to go skipping any further down memory lane. Skipping, hop scotch? Hop scotch would be a more fun way to do it, preferably so long as he didn’t have to draw out all the lines in chalk beforehand. Then again, the old girl could always—

His feet do a merry little dance beneath him as the TARDIS jiggles the grating under him, once again jolting him into the present.

Right then. Now to the task at hand. Fetch Jack, leave Jack (again). Red wire, blue wire. The Earth or Gallifrey (he didn’t want to think about that one).

The TARDIS wheezes in her best approximation of a threat. “Sorry, sorry.”

He bounces about the console, yanking and touching and pressing until—

The time rotor pulses, warms. Rises, falls. The great domed coral walls deepen in colour from gold to a luscious bronze-brass that he drinks in with great satisfaction.

Here we come, Jack-my-boy.

* * *

The ship is an old banger; a cobbled-together junk heap of spare parts kept together with varying levels of ingenuity. When he detects spit and…other, less desirable biological produce is the only sealant on a lumpy gash in the ship’s hull, the Doctor decides he’d better get his game on and leave the wreck as soon as possible.

Yet, despite its dubious structural integrity, the vessel has life in her yet. The Doctor knows it as true as he can feel the glossy span of her existence; the memories of the crew imprinted onto the rusted metal like a stamp. Solid, blocky; a declaration of those who had loved and lived in this ship.

On a sentimental whim the Doctor has a rummage with the first working computer terminal he finds, just to see if he can get the poor girl’s name.

“Fir-rar-eie-won?” he exclaims in delight, a grin splitting his face in two. “Blimey, now that’s a name and a half isn’t it? Aww, don’t worry,” he continues, stroking the terminal’s dusty flank fondly. “I’ll just call you…Won? …Oh no, that’s like what Ron’s girlfriend calls him in that Harry Potter book, isn’t it?” he despairs. “Good old J.K certainly created an irritant there if there ever was one.”

At that moment the terminal chooses to make his mind up for him, blinking up a message in block capitals: FIRRA BRIDGE BREACH.

“Firra,” he chuckles, rolling the r’s and loving it. “Firra, Firra, Firra my girl, thank you for telling me where not to go!”

Where not to go indeed, because from what his time sense is telling him there is a certain fixed point just around the corner, and that’s most definitely not where the bridge is. 

So, the Doctor can conclude that a) either there are still some crew on board – but if that were so, why would they need to break onto their own bridge? Or b) the Firra had some uninvited intruders besides himself and a certain Captain.

He is pretty certain – and by ‘pretty certain’ he meant certain – that option b) is the one he should count on. The TARDIS seems to agree, at least – the moment he averts his thoughts from investigating the bridge she gives a pleased little hum of satisfaction in the back of his mind.

“All right then, old girl,” he says, more to himself than his ship. Even so, he feels her pleasure at his acknowledgement.

Giving the terminal one last affectionate pat, he takes a firm hold of his time sense and heads straight towards the place where Time feels the sickest.

He finds Jack less than five minutes later; huddled out of sight in a corner beneath some piping. It isn’t like Jack to hide. None of this is like Jack.

The Doctor crouches, hobbles over to him best he can while on his haunches, and plants his backside down on the dirty grating directly opposite Jack.

“Hullo, Jack.”

Something stirs behind the flat blue of his eyes, and it isn’t something the Doctor likes. “You came.”

“I did indeed. Well, I came when called, to be precise.” He pauses, trying to find a more delicate way to put it but finding that for all his centuries he’s coming up blank. “What happened?”

Because this isn’t like Jack. Jack is all smiles and flirting and laughter (except that disastrous Year that the Doctor really doesn’t want to think about right now), and this is a man in suffering.

He knows the signs well. After all, reflective surfaces are hard to avoid.

His hearts flutter anxiously when Jack expels a hitching little breath. “…He’s gone, Doc.”

There is no inflection in the words, but the Doctor knows what Jack means when he says ‘gone.’ Gone as in dead and buried and lost.

He thinks of Gallifrey and…and the Master (Koschei, _oh_ ), and his hearts ache.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he says, and by Rassilon he hates those words. Hates the taste of them in his mouth, and though he knows that thought is illogical it feels so right he can’t dispute it. “Jack,” he says, finally; grounding him. He can see it, the grounding – can see the hardening of Jack’s eyes, in the mind beyond. “You called. Come with me.”

He stands and Jack stands and they make to leave, when all hell breaks loose.

“Hands up, hands up or we shoot!” screams a humanoid female as she and two others burst in through the access panel up ahead – well, humanoid, but she is far more birdlike than any human. She even has a beak, and the Doctor silently thanks the TARDIS’ translators when he thinks of what kind of impossible-to-pronounce bird-song-esque language she must be speaking right now. “Who are you?”

“I’m the Doctor, and this is Jack,” responds the Doctor with a daft grin. He waves cheerfully. “Hullo!”

* * *

The bird-woman’s name is Ahkallais and she’s far more agreeable than her first impression suggested. Turns out she and her two partners – her brothers, Rhkarana and Lhurranik – run a small maintenance business and they’d been called in by the Firra’s Captain, a woman by the name of Marulva Rirrit, to do some repair work. She’d not said much when they questioned her about the kind of repairs they might have to do, only saying that they’d been in a dogfight with another vessel and that they were in need of some decent patching before they could limp back home.

When Ahkallais and her brothers had arrived on their own ship, a tiny little vessel they called the Rhada, they’d found the Firra to be an empty husk. Confused, they’d broken into the bridge to see if anyone had holed up there, only to find the half-rotted corpses of the entire crew. Scared out of their wits, they’d detected the Doctor and Jack’s life-signs and headed straight to them in a bid for answers.

Getting increasingly worried at Jack’s lack of speech – not since his admission of the death of someone dear to him had he uttered a single word – the Doctor manages to jabber their way off of the Firra in a remarkably short amount of time. He shuts the TARDIS’ doors in the trio’s startled faces and leans against them wearily, allowing his shields to relax so as to allow her in. She does so, humming to him as she always has; coiling around his mind and settling herself down. He can feel her there; a steady, solid presence; an anchor for his butterfly mind.

He sends her into the Vortex, adjusting the controls until she’s merely drifting aimlessly through the time-tracks like an eagle soaring through the sky. Roaming in endless, effortless circles; made buoyant by Time, floating on the uncountable possibilities the future may hold.

With one last check to make sure they are absolutely set on staying in the Vortex and that the TARDIS isn’t going to try anything cheeky, he sets off to find Jack.

The Captain had disappeared the moment he came aboard, heading off into the TARDIS’ interior with the distinct air of a man on a mission. The Doctor doesn’t need to follow the sick feeling in his gut to know where he’s gone. 

What with all the attention the Doctor’s been giving her, the TARDIS is unusually compliant in helping him find Jack; shifting her rooms so that the first door he tries leads him straight to his destination. He strokes the doorframe by way of thanks, and smiles at the smug hum she responds with.

The TARDIS library had always been one of the Doctor’s favourite places - silvery trees that were not merely one of her constructs but were grown from seeds the Doctor had taken from Gallifrey itself long ago cast shimmering lights over the ornate bookshelves – bookshelves where the literature of a thousand worlds mingled, from the most ancient of human texts to scripts written beneath the twin suns of an orange sky…

No time for reminiscing. He has a Jack to puzzle out.

* * *

He finds him sprawled face-down on a battered old sofa the Doctor had picked up from twenty-first century America. Or twenty-second. Or maybe he’d gotten it off of the French. No, not the French. The British hold a nice warm spot in his hearts, like a cat curled up in the sun – the two nations chafe too much for him to pick it up from there. It would feel a bit like being disloyal. Jack’s quite a lot like the sofa would be if it really were from France (which it totally is not, never mind the French on the label he can see poking out the back). What with all the chafing.

Besides, America is far too good at sofas. American sofas are so soft they eat you alive. At least, that’s his experience of American sofas. For all he knows there could be a little bony British-style sofa hiding away in an American house somewhere, ready to bite your arse off the moment you park it.

Jack has an American accent to everyone but the Doctor, because the Doctor hears and reads everything in a language that is dead. But speaking a dead tongue (feeling it rot and blacken in his mouth) is not the reason why Jacky-boy doesn’t sound American to the Doctor.

To the Doctor, Rose’s voice was low, a little nasally, with peaks and spikes of tone all over the place. Working-class inner-London. Martha was a little higher, a bit posher but still distinctly London. Harriet Jones had been posher again.

Jack’s voice was deep-ish and smooth and lovely, with that distinctively nasal American twang, but beneath it had been a soft bur of something else entirely. Not something to be heard, but something to be felt. It’s prickle, a stab of arid heat, of biting sand upon your skin. In Jack’s voice the Doctor can hear the 51st Century. More precisely, he can hear the Boeshane Peninsula.

Beneath Rose’s and Martha’s and Mickey’s and Donna’s there had been a rolling laughter, a startlingly fierce pride and an almost savage sense of resourcefulness. In their voices he hears 21st Century Earth, Europe, the United Kingdom. Tallulah, sweet foolish little three ‘ls’ and a ‘h’, had been as bold and confident and wonderful as any American he’d met who’d not been an evil super-genius. Minus the white Persian. Only the British evil super-villains get Persies.

Anyway. Back to Jack. Ooooh, that rhymes. Poetry is such a lovely thing. ACDC, now there’s a good band. Oooh, or Coldplay, except the band name has always seemed a bit odd. Then again, The Beatles. Maybe madcap band names are an indicator of greatness. That must mean ‘Noah and the Whale’ is destined for a No.1 album sometime in the future. He’ll have to check.

“Doctor.”

Oh, Jacky-boy’s talking. Something flares hot and fierce in his hearts, and he nearly walks out. Nearly. Instead he drops down into a crouch on the floor at the sofa’s side, near Jack’s head. The door he came in through has gone, and he can hear the TARDIS laughing – a lazy, rolling burble – at him.

He tries to speak but can’t, is tongue-tied like never. He talks and talks, chin-wags and gossips and natters away about nothing, but when it comes down to this, the nitty-gritty, he’s like a bird flying into a headwind. His tongue catches on his teeth, shaping the words, but his throat stays relaxed and soft.

Jack’s eyes are very blue. They’re staring at him – Jack’s rolled onto his side, is watching his face intently, waiting for those stalling words. His irises contain lovely flecks of silver and cobalt.

“Jack.”

Something soars over Jack’s features, something cold and huge and terrible (like a mirror) and then his lips are pressing fierce against the Doctor’s. He burns his time-sense, making his hearts stumble and quake. His eyes are full of gold as the time-lines convulse and flare, resplendent. He’s blinded.

Then Jack’s gone, the door’s back again and he’s running, running with the savage grace of a desperate man. The TARDIS shudders and bucks beneath the Doctor’s feet and he knows she’s flying, soaring down out of the Vortex before Jack has chance to hurl himself out of her doors. She has the power to stop him, but he wouldn’t want her to and so she wouldn’t. She has pride, honour. She’s a good girl.

He flings himself to his feet, making a beeline for the console room – but his good girl has taken the door again, leaving him in the vast room with its silvered light and soaring shelves and the glossy orange-red robes hanging glorious on the far wall like a promise. He screams and hammers at the door and for a moment he’s as mad, as madcap and hatter-mad as his inner mind.

_Oh, a cobweb_. A tiny little spider catches his eye, suspended a few feet to his right on a fine silver thread. He steadies again.

Then his hearts smooth out into a gentle throb. Jack is gone. The door is back. He saunters through it and hums all the way back to the console room. When he gets there he picks Jack’s coat up off one of the coral struts, presses it to his face for a moment before neatly folding it and sliding it in amongst the wiring at the base of the console, where Jack himself had liked to lay when he was still normal (still human).

The TARDIS takes flight again, a gentle ascent as a soft apology. She enters the Vortex with a soft thrum of satisfaction, before banking into a time track and riding it, joy flushing her coral bright and healthy. Inside the Doctor smiles with his mouth but cries with his eyes, his hearts, because he knows that Jack-y boy has done what good little Time Agents never should (have never been able to).

He’s loved. The Doctor knows it because once he had been the one fleeing another’s TARDIS, confused and terrified and (alone) crying.

Oh, _Koschei_.

The TARDIS flies on through time, alone.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a fair while back, and am now moving it (along with the rest of my fic) from livejournal. Most of my Who fic is focused on the Doctor's thoughts and opinions, as well as exploring what it really means to be the last. Hope you enjoy! ^__^


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